David J. Roulston was born in England in November 1936. He attended Bangor Grammar School for 9 years and
in 1957 he obtained a B.Sc. degree from Queen's University Belfast.
He received a Ph.D. degree from Imperial College London in 1962 and was awarded the D.Sc. degree from the
University of London in 1994 for his research on the physics of semiconductor devices.
In 2011 he was awarded an honorary D.Eng. degree from the University of Waterloo, Ontario.
From 1957 to 1958 he was a Scientific Officer at H.M. Underwater Detection Establishment, Portland, Dorset.
From 1962 to 1967 he was a Research Engineer with CSF, Puteaux, France,
working on microwave semiconductor circuits. In 1967 he joined the Department of Electrical Engineering,
University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada as an Associate Professor and in 1971 he became a Professor.
He has also held consulting positions with R&D laboratories in Canada, France (STMicroelectronics),
Japan, UK, USA, and with the UN Industrial Development Organisation working at CEERI, Pilani, India.
He was an invited lecturer on semiconductor device physics at INPG Grenoble, France for many years
until 2002. For the academic year 1988-1989 he was on sabbatical leave at the University of Oxford,
UK where he was a Visiting Fellow at Wolfson College, with research in the Department of Materials;
this was followed by many subsequent return visits.
His research interests are in studying physical processes in semiconductor devices.
He is responsible for development of the BIPOLE3 computer program for numerical
simulation of semiconductor devices,
which has been used worldwide by semiconductor companies. The BIPOLE3 software is original
in concept having built-in knowledge of the physics and structure of bipolar and MOS
devices which makes it
approximately 100 times faster than competing 'general' semiconductor device software;
this makes it ideal both as an education tool for teaching and research and for industrial CAD applications.
Since 2002 a free educational version of this software has been available on the Internet
for teaching and research use in universities.
David Roulston has published over 100 technical papers in the top journals in his field and
has had 6 patents awarded in the areas of microwave and optical detector circuits and bipolar devices.
He is co-editor of the IEEE press book "Polysilicon Emitter Bipolar Transistors" (1989), author
of the McGraw-Hill graduate text "Bipolar Semiconductor Devices" (1990) and author of the
Oxford University Press book: "Introduction to the Physics of Semiconductor Devices" (1999).
In 1996 he retired to Oxford, UK where he maintains his membership of Wolfson College and
continues support of the Bipole3 semiconductor device simulation software in conjunction
with the University of Waterloo.